Quark Enhances QuarkDMS

Quark today announced several developments for QuarkDMS. QuarkDMS is the company's workflow and asset management software for publishing. New enhancements include new editorial and ad clients, contract rights management, workflow design, Web copyfitting, Web site management, storage options and SOAP support.

Included in the announcements is Quark's new QuarkDMS Editorial Client, which includes workflow features that let users route assets to other people or groups and receive notifications that assets have been assigned. Each user has an inbox for new projects, and users can define page elements that belong to an article, then track and manage those elements as a unit throughout the workflow.

The new Ad Production Client allows designers to use ad booking data to create production tasks and associate media to each task. It automatically creates QuarkXPress documents in the appropriate size for each ad.

Quark says the new client software "integrates seamlessly" with QuarkXPress, so users can create pages by dragging and dropping assets and multi-page articles into documents. QuarkDMS Editorial Client also works with QuarkCopyDesk SE, a stand-alone copyfitting application.

QuarkDMS now also offers a Contracts Administrator for managing media rights. The software allows users to define, manage and enforce rights on media used in publications for reusing media across channels without infringing on the rights of the media creators.

On the Web side, QuarkDMS includes Web copyfitting and Web site management capabilities. The Web Site Manager software provides a repository for assets and can import all of the content and files of an existing Web site into QuarkDMS, while retaining file relationships, metadata and site structure. WebCopyDesk lets writers use a Web browser to place and fit stories directly onto QuarkXPress pages stored in QuarkDMS. WebCopyDesk uses the same text processing engine as QuarkXPress and displays documents with accurate typography, even if the required fonts or QuarkXPress software are not available on the user's local machine, according to Quark.

Other new QuarkDMS options include:

Workflow Designer, which allows for workflow modeling based on graphical templates.

Support for SOAP, a framework for XML-based data interchange for integration with applications like Microsoft Excel.

A new Storage Agent, which is designed to give remote users faster access to media assets.

QuarkDMS and the various options announced today can be purchased directly through Quark. For more information, visit http://www.quark.com.